This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention disclosed below. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise explicitly indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section. Abbreviations that may be found in the specification and/or the drawing figures are defined below at the end of the specification but prior to the claims.
Wireless traffic volumes are dramatically outstripping macro cellular capability. Having multiple smaller cell coverage areas (such as femto or similar cells used in, e.g., a customer's premises, commonly created by an HeNB) controlled by a single controller (such as a home eNB Gateway) is anticipated to be a potential solution to this problem. For instance, a macro cell might provide coverage over a larger area, where there are multiple cells formed by HeNBs under this larger coverage area. The HeNBs might be controlled by the HeNB GW. In this manner, users within the smaller cells share data resources amongst a smaller set of users and typically the HetNet configuration can provide higher capacity and a faster network overall.
However, when there are many HeNBs in an area or otherwise connected to a single HeNB GW, there can be problems in certain instances. For instance, paging can be problematic for an idle UE, as an HeNB GW has to send a paging messages to all HeNBs which match the tracking area and CSG, which could be a large number of HeNBs.